


For What My Mind's Worth

by Luidilovins



Category: Ancient Roman Religion & Lore
Genre: Author Commentary, Near Death Experiences, Nonfiction, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:49:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24726277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luidilovins/pseuds/Luidilovins
Summary: Written 6/10/2020It might just be a phase I have to go through before i find my new norm. But I don't have the answers that I crave.I worry that by the time I have those answers I won't have the power to articulate it.I articulate this now in hopes of preserving myself. However I hope I can look back on this time capsule of my life and laugh it off as thinking i was so deep and gothic about life.I genuinely want to have my good humor in a forseeable future above all else.But if it's not just pretentious gothic prose. And I won't grow out of it. Then that means this might be my last authetic self I'm willing to share.This is a real, albeit warped reality that I live in. Not a metaphor for life. Every time I have an episode I lose a little more of...something. I'm not sure what that something is and I don't know if I'll ever get it back.I'm ready for answers and all that it entail. And I'll be sorely pissed if this is the thing I'm best remembered for.
Relationships: None





	1. Chapter 1

How can I sleep when I am at my darkest?

I know He's waiting for me because I have met him several times before. Or at least I think it's a He. I only get a vague impression of his form as I squint through the darkness. I didn't know his name the first time I met him. Later after a google search I knew his name. I still don't know how to pronounce it out loud and I never want to. 

Every time I go back there I find myself on the shores of a river. I would say that the river is black, but then I'd have to say that the smooth stones under my feet are black, and the cave walls are black and I don't rightfully know. Everything I see is an impression that my mind might very well be making up. 

There never has been any life or light here. The water smells sour but not stagnant. I get a feeling that I wouldn't even find cave crickets if I looked around. I'm a welcomed guest but I am the only guest. 

An underwater catacomb that had never seen daylight that I was allowed to see for myself. Given my love for these sort of things, I was sort of flattered I was allowed in at all. 

The first time I met him I got nervous, because I knew who he was. I told him I didn't bring any coins so maybe I should stay on the shores. I don't think he would even take USD, had I any. I chuckled at the notion and offered him a rock on the shore because it's all I had to offer. I don't know if he accepted it out of amusement, or because he was aware of my deep sensitive love of rocks but I got to board his boat. 

Slivers of gray overlap silhouettes of black overlap slivers of gray. 

The rowboat is unadorned with gothic structure. Neither held together nor encrusted with bones as one might think. It felt less complex and smaller than it should have been. Though perhaps I was thinking of the business on a more capitalistic basis than the principle needed expression. 

I've never been the sort of person to have vivid dreams. I used to get night terrors as a child but even then I'd wake up not remembering what I was screaming and fighting about. I always sensed it was a good thing. But this wasn't one of those dreams. It couldn't be because I would go on remembering it. 

My senses had ellipsed somewhere between the sharpness of contortions and pain, and the fuzziness of confusion and exhaustion. To the point where the realities of being here and being there were an ellipse of the self. The familiarity of an instance that never occurred was the dead giveaway.

"I'm dying aren't I?" 

It didn't feel as grave as I would normally expect. More of a drag or an inconvenience on my part. 

He didn't speak. I don't know if he can. So I started speaking, like the clown I am even on my paddle to the inevitable. I never was a devout Christian. I've believed in nothing my whole life. I thought I'd be met with nothing as a tax for my belief in nothing. So I was sort of blindsided that Roman Polytheism was the One True Religion. I found it quite hilarious. 

And I went on saying "Either this is what's supposed to be this cosmic enlightenment that people always talk about. Or I'm far down along enough that the brain trauma is doing that thing where it makes you feel enlightened but when you talk about it to anyone it's just lunatical ravings and later in the episode of Grey's Anatomy they find a brain tumor the size of a tangerine."

I asked him if I was being annoying but I had a sense I wasn't his worst customer. I told him that a lot of people in my life would consider me a breath of fresh air as far as conversationalism goes. If i was ever going to brag about my existence it was a good time to do it. I still try to be that breath of fresh air because people deserve to break from the mundane at least a few times before they die. I always figured I could be a mule for that experience. Taste something real. Say real things. 

I told him that of all the things I got right "inky darkness" was one of them. And a silent ferryman taking me to the afterlife while I racketballed my own egotistical ideas off of sounded to me like something I would design to my own device. 

"It's funny though… I spent so much time trying to exist outside of monotony. But in the end I'm just listening to myself talk. Because you're imaginary right? So all the things I had to say, I never got to connect with someone on them. So they die with me huh. So that means I'm actually in hell right? Because that's the most custom tailored torture to me?" 

I never did get an answer. But I did get angry. I never shouted at him or blamed him for myself. But I did question what I did to deserve it. My queerness? My selfishness? My pride? My inflexibility? Or the fact that I thought that none of those traits warranted eternal damnation? It was ridiculous and more importantly cruel. 

Had I known that while I was alive I would have apologized less and been even more hedonistic (or at least my personal brand) so maybe I did deserve to go to hell. 

The distant pains from beyond the cave walls spanned out in abstraction. 

By that point, He was no longer on the boat with me. I was ambling along the lazy currents and sinking further into the cavern that laid just behind the flesh of my left eye. The white-hot almond sized spot at the top of my skull. 

I had shambles of clarity, but I knew somehow that the despondent pains echoed outside the walls was my body doing its best to stay alive. I was having a seizure and it had been going on for a long time. I have had them before but usually I never saw anything. It was usually pitch black. 

I was dying and there was nothing I could do about it. 

Oblivion was one of two things. My mind stringing along whatever logical explanations to outer stimulus in my final moments between life and death, before pitch black. Or eternal hell. 

"Maybe that's all that Born Again raving is about. The mind putting itself through eternal hell or eternal bliss based on how much adrenaline is running through your system. Just primal fear of a dismantled reality. The uncontrollable? The inevitability of my words cut short before I had a chance to live? How is that fair? How is any of that fair to people when they're still alive? How is that fair to me?" 

That's the thing about fairness. It just wasn't. I would have been more okay with death if I had accomplished more. If I had been seen and heard more. I spent twenty two years of my life asleep and I died after two. 

This wasn't a dream or a hypothetical river I wanted to humor by floating down anymore. Of all the projections my mind could have put in before I died it was the reminder that I didn't live for much. That was hell. Fear of being forgotten. The time I wasted on tiptoeing on abuse. The risks I refused to take and the pain it caused be simply because I didn't want to be placed back in that spot ever again. 

If I was going to suffer that for the rest of my time before I was truly dead then what the fuck was I so afraid of while I was alive?

The thought that I figured that part out alone behind my eye as my body gave up on me filled me with such rage I didn't know how to process it. I was never allowed to be angry as a child. Contrary to popular belief little autistic girls who are shy are often left undiagnosed, but the violent little autisitc girls were often improperly diagnosed. I threw tantrums often and my parents would wrestle me to the ground and hold me as I screamed hard enough for the fringes of my eye blackened. 

Eventually I just stopped feeling anything. It was the only way I could keep my body as my own.

This wasn't my first near death experience either. 

I was maybe sixteen. I said something rude to my mother. I wasn't sure how awful it was because I can't remember it now. I'm sorry regardless. My father had stormed into my room with that kind of ballistic rage that I wasn't allowed to possess myself. It was that kind of rage that I knew to check out and absorb whenever confronted. 

He had picked me up by the front of my shirt. Screaming an inch from my face. I died that moment. It was just a fuzzy inky blackness. A moment of peace that I always hoped in finding. 

Later I woke up with steri-strips in my left eyebrow. I was laying on my bed and my mother was yelling at my father asking if he had knocked my lights out. He claimed he didn't and for some reason I believe him. 

"I've never seen anything like it. [Incorrect pronoun] eyes just rolled into [incorrect pronoun] head and went limp. I dropped [incorrect pronoun] by accident I wasn't expecting that weight." 

My head hit tile stickered flooring covering concrete, the rim of my glasses dug into my eyebrow. They never took me to the hospital in fear that the doctors would come to the same conclusion my mother initially took. I cried really hard that night.  
My parents didn't know that the reason I was crying was because I didn't want to come back. I was dead and I accepted it immediately. 

As I swept by the currents I hated literally every ion of my existence. I could have died by sixteen and gone to heaven, if my theory on the heaven or hell dichotomy was entirely based on stress. But why now? 

How can I sleep when I was finally given an inch of light in my life? 

I had met real people and I was cusping on real connections for the first time in my life. I was playing with the idea of having real feelings, excited like a small child who gets a real puppy for the first time rather than a toy puppy every birthday. 

I treaded water long enough to wake up. 

I woke up in my bedroom choking and tired and shaken like I often did after an episode. I still don't know how to feel about the experience. Unsurprisingly I'm not a Born Again Roman Polythesist nor will I ever believe in an afterlife with the only evidence being a mind that I can't trust to reliably gather information anymore.

Recently I've been taking up mindfulness meditation to sift through the experience. Ask myself what sort of imprint on the world in the case that I see Charon and sail the River Styx behind my left eye for a final time. Ask myself how to break this cycle of sifting through my personality for what's most presentable and agreeable. And what parts belong to that I refer to as the White Trash Family Cycle, created and maintained through elective ignorance and unchecked mental illness. Ask myself how much left over of my mind is my own to claim. 

I don't have answers. But I've seen Him at least four times now. Each time happens similarly more or less. Each time we dip into a channel that falls into a deeper part of the cavern. The last time I tried to climb out of the boat and swim upstream but I washed into a cavity that's waterfall was too heavy to push myself out. 

I keep telling myself I have various neurology appointments coming up. Keep telling myself that weaker people have been through more and come out alive on the other end. Try to convince myself that the white space of static in my mind isn't a tumor but instead some psychosomatic focal point to blame on my haywire overall electrical circuitry. Because I can pinpoint the acute pains in my skull at all, so clearly they're the problem. 

I can't paint the way I used to. I don't draw anymore. I don't even know if my writing is articulate or legible. It's all just synapsis and pulsating morse code that tells me it's real and valid. 

What I do know is that I'm tired of treading water.


	2. A Continuum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I still have no answers to what's happening. 
> 
> I wish I did. 
> 
> I still know what's real and what's not, at least after the effect. 
> 
> I haven't gone delusional. Perhaps an inflated paranoia, but whether thats from psychosis or trauma thats the catch 22.
> 
> I've never had troubles with discerning reality, albeit maybe anxious or heavily guarded. I still don't. 
> 
> What matters is the experiences I'm feeling are real and I am real.

"I'm not… I'm not going." I stood on the shores once again. Lungs collapsing in on my skin. 

I was tired of treading water. Fuck i was just plain old tired. This was maybe my fifth or sixth time seeing Charon. Each time I had gotten on the boat and followed it wherever it took me. Hoping I'd bob along until I'd see the end of it. 

Each and every time, eventually, I had been left on the boat alone. Knocked off into the water. Gotten tired of waiting and decided to take my chances and swim back. Etcetera etcetera. 

He didn't respond to me, but he didn't leave either. He stood on the boat and stared. 

"Does that mean you're gonna get mad at me?" I ringed my hands like a nervous child, "Or I won't get another chance?" 

There was a long drawn out silence. Stillness and lapping of water on the rocks beneath my feet but no sound came of it. "Can I explain before you get mad?" 

I told him about my relationship with God. When I was maybe ten, or eleven, I'm not sure. I was living in Arizona at that time. Driftwood blvd. We found a baby bird that had been injured and we put it in a box. It didn't make it through the night. 

I was upset but I expected it to happen. It wasn't doing well. It was weak and small and pitiful. 

A few days later my father brought home a baby chipmunk. We put it in a box. 

I prayed to God to help it live. I wanted to release it into the wild. It started getting larger. It was drinking the formula we gave it. It's thin velvet grew to fur. 

Then it died. 

It died without warning or reason. I remember I cried so hard. Screaming 'Why?' My mother told me to get a fucking grip. I sucked it up like I was trained to do. 

It wasn't necessarily the chipmunk that made me lose my shit. Maybe it's childish to stop believing in god because he didn't answer my prayer. But my prayer wasn't selfish. It was fair enough a request for a child. But that was a clear moment in my life. Realizing that prayer didn't deem results. And that I wasn't allowed to lose my shit after learning that the universe was without fairness or reason. 

Maybe a year or two later. My memory begins to grow fuzzy at this point, my mother got sick. Deathly sick. Pancreatic cystic fibrosis. Delta F08, like the one my sister carried, and 5T allele like I carried created a combo that at that point had only been reported three times in history. She's actually gotten several entries in the Medical journal not ganking legs here. 

I sucked it up. I went to middle school. I got unexceptional grades. Did chores for a family of five, I was the eldest. Babysat. Waited for a phone call. Not just a phone call. The phone call. 

My mother was hospitalized for two years. My father was allowed to run rampant. Every Saturday I had to drain whatever I had inside me and put on a brave face for our visits, under the unspoken pressures of it being the last. 

It was like looking at a dying animal in a box. She was brittle. And the smile on my face was as real as God's prayer. 

I broke down in school. I told my friends my mother was dying and there was nothing I could do about it. My friends didn't know how to console me in the courtyard and the bell rang. They brought me to the guidance counselor. To which her only advice was "Your mom's going to be fine. I have type 2 diabetes too." 

I sucked it up. I had a phone call to wait for. A box to watch a pitiful thing draw its last shaky breath in. 

There was an experimental surgery. My mom was dying and willing to give it a shot. Best case scenario was her liver would take in islet cells as a surrogate pancreas. Medium case was it was unsuccessful and she would be a Type 1 diabetic. Worst case was death. Either way it would finally put an end to waiting around. 

My mom told us to pray for her as she was flown to Minnesota for the surgery. One might argue that God answered someone else's prayer in the house. But one could argue god to smite her to teach me a lesson. I didn't pray.

My mother lived anyways. Medium case scenario. Still dwindling on that edge with the PTSD to pack the punch. The fourth of her kind and the only one still alive enough to never let me forget. 

God changed nothing. And yet she credits him every day rather than credits herself for being spiteful enough to still be alive. Weaponized him as proof that I am a liar because He told her in a dream. Hides behind the threadbare guilt of being physically and mentally sick. And allowing that good ol' White Trash Cycle to continue. 

She had told me she had spoken to God and told him she didn't feel like dying. Some part of me wish she did. I could have idealized her image on my family mantle piece. Told myself we would have been more happy and functional were she still around. A martyr with no death becomes a bad omen. 

Becomes a constant stalemate of waiting for an unanswered phone call. 

I've grown tired of God. 

I shuffled about on the shore as Charon listened to me. I looked for a conclusion but I couldn't find one. 

The shuddering quivering fight for life was familiar to me from a young age. And I knew that it was happening to me now. I had gotten so caught up trying not to become my father that I ended up being my mother. 

Now I was putting my friends through it by drawing in shuddering breaths. A pitiful dying thing in a box for others to peer into and wishing very much that they didn't have to wait. 

I felt small and young and frail. My voice came out meek. "Every time I get on the boat, I never make it to the other side. Is it okay if I wait? Just until it's over?" 

He waited for me to speak again but the throbs of myself were growing strained. I started crying and he slowly dismounted from his boat. Walked up to me on the shore. Held my hand. He was surprisingly warm. 

Maybe it's because it was my own hand I had to hold. 

By the time I was lucid enough I was exhausted and thirsty. I crawled out of my bedroom on all fours and drank apple juice straight from the fridge. My roommate watched me seize two more times before she and my neighbor brought me to the emergency room. 

They were witness to my symptoms but the security officer wasn't allowing people besides patients in. I struggled to tell people what was even wrong. 

My CAT scan came back normal. The emergency doctor who spent maybe five minutes with me decided to prescribe me tums because he thought I couldn't tell the difference between biting into my own flesh and losing hours of my life from a stomach ache. 

I walked into the neurology clinic, date pushed back from February to April to June due to corona. I was fifteen minutes early and six hours short as per requested for an EEG. The receptionist informed me I should have checked my voicemail because they cancelled my appointment. She had no idea why. 

I asked her what it took for it to be considered "an emergency" and she said  
"Multiple seizures or loss of time." 

Hah.

She scheduled me for September. I've been having episodes since mid December 2018. 

Not even two days later I disappeared into a field besides my apartment complex. I was unaccounted for for a full 45 minutes. My friends tracked me down and I was sitting cross legged and confused by the chamomile and scotch broom. 

My cat had slipped past my roommate's feet as they left and bolted towards the field looking for me. 

Even when i take her out for walks now and then, she will insist on going home early, knowing I'm stumbling about to get my footing and getting lost in between the wild rye and rusted wire fencing. I never trained my cat, Heather to do much of anything except leash training. 

Sometimes she headbutts my door in the middle of the night until I let her in. Yells whenever I'm in the shower for too long. She is in no means an affectionate cat.  
I've written a living will instructing to have my cat see me before my body is disposed of. If I disappeared one day she wouldn't understand why. 

Out of all my friends I worry about disappointing Heather the most.

The next time I slip away I hope that He will hold my hand and console me. That I won't be small and pitiful. The next time I get on that boat I'm going to be ready to board. 

And I hope my friends make bank for compensation. 

I hope my cat finds it in her to move on. 

I can't ask anyone for more than that. 

If it's some sort of late-onset schizoaffective panic I will take my pills and continue with my therapist as I've been doing since I was a child. 

Same for bipolar. Which runs in the family. 

If it's a treatable seizure disorder I'll have to find a new norm. I'll have no choice. I would have a goal at least. 

If it's a tumor I'm more than willing to have someone pull it out. I imagine it feeling something like a tickle in my nose. If it's benign, then fine. If not, then I hate to break it to anyone reading this but I don't think I have enough fight in me as it is. 

It's funny because I already know what people would say in those situations. Like an echo from the past about my mother. "I couldn't imagine going through brain surgery. It must be a nightmare." 

And I can imagine what I would say back. 

"Actually it's not."


End file.
